The Shiva Option
by David A. Taylor
1.
Dmitri Somers rode to the conference center, cocooned in the office car from Bangkok’s dense custard of sound, struggling to collect his thoughts. A street vendor, threading her cart between lanes in the long jam of traffic, drew his focus. It was a welcome distraction from the task before him, which his supervisor had assigned the day before, of giving a public presentation about their research on tree species for farm families. At a conference! Twenty-four hours notice.
“The invitation had been there a while. I think he just didn’t read it,” said Tinya, the office manager. She told Dmitri this in a tone of consolation. He’d spent the rest of the afternoon reshuffling slides to assemble a story: trees in orderly rows, lush trees on farms, spindly saplings in dry terrain.
Outside his passenger window, a tuk-tuk rushed by with a tourist slumped in the backseat.
His driver, Daeng, was a sturdy man with a gruff laugh. After they turned onto a busy street near the city center, Daeng pointed to the roadside and said, “That woman speaks very good Thai.”
Dmitri looked where Daeng was pointing: a white woman in a sarong was using a traditional broom to brush the wet pavement. Doubled over as she flicked trash into the trickle of the gutter, she didn’t look like the image of proficiency.
“I hear her on the radio,” Daeng continued, “and she speaks Thai very well. She’s lived here for a long time. Maybe twenty years.”
Dmitri was often taken off guard by this kind of comment from Daeng. With a few followup questions, they eventually got to the point where Dmitri, as an American from Pennsylvania Dutch country, might have started the conversation. He would have said: “That woman runs a training school for dogs. The place she’s sweeping, that’s her pet supply shop. Sometimes I hear her on the radio.”
No, instead the driver came at it from a sharp angle.
They crawled through traffic past another set of posters for the upcoming election. The posters came in clusters of three photographs each, headshots pasted to every lamppost, red numerals beneath the faces indicating which box to mark on the ballot. Paper medallions fluttered everywhere. This would be the first election in years. Yet all the headshots simply reminded Dmitri of the posters of the Thai junta members that were still up on billboards.
“They say banks in the Northeast have run out of fifty-baht notes,” Daeng said. He shook his head. “So much vote-buying.”
Daeng rarely talked politics, was always crisply dressed. Yet Dmitri heard from Tinya that the driver was more of an activist than he let on, and even spent evenings tearing down posters of the junta’s candidates. Riots the week before had left people on edge. News reports were confusing. The other day Daeng had left the office early to visit a friend in the hospital. Dmitri had many questions, some doubtless inappropriate. Like, where had his friend been hurt? Now Dmitri was itching to follow up that vote-buying comment but felt paralyzed by what he knew of Thai politeness.
They rode mostly silent for the rest of the way.
When their progress stalled near the Buffalo Bridge intersection, Daeng cleared his throat. Dmitri expected him to hock out the window. Instead, the driver glanced in the rearview and asked, “Is Madam Meetri okay?”
Dmitri nodded. “Still in Bali. She’s fine, thanks.” Now it was his turn to go quiet, with her being gone two weeks and counting.
As they reached the conference center, Dmitri felt jitters about his presentation. As conferences go, this wasn’t a big draw, but if Dmitri did a good job more chances might come up. He and Jan had talked about traveling more. He was hoping for trips to Hanoi and Manila. She was now with her sister in Indonesia, strolling to a batik gallery in Ubud or soaking up the peace of a ricefield at breakfast.
The lights went down for his talk, and then the tech troubles escalated. First the clicker refused to advance. Dmitri kept squeezing it like he was searching for its pulse. No change, then it clicked furiously. PowerPoint went berserk and the images suddenly sped up on their own. Dmitri tried to catch up, and scrambled his sentences—a forest in Australia, the plantation with cracked soil of poor farmland in northeastern Thailand, a ditch choked with leaves.
He sensed, in his stomach, the audience abandoning him. But the images kept going, the way still images flash on the screen in a futurist Chris Marker film. Except they were eucalyptus trees passing in a dizzying stutter. When he finished, a pall fell on the room. Someone at the back raised her hand and asked why Dmitri’s group conducted research on “inappropriate” tree species, exotics that soaked up precious water that farmers needed for other crops?
Dmitri cleared his throat. “It’s true the trees can be placed where they aren’t well suited for local needs, but that doesn’t make them wrong everywhere,” he replied. “You need to choose your location wisely.”
There were no further questions. The session ended. He could breathe again.
He encountered his interrogator afterward in the marbled lobby. She was Thai, and wore a striking, deep blue sari. She swept up to him, balancing a plate with a slice of yellow cake, and interrupted the organizer, who was apologizing for the audiovisual glitch.
“Extraordinary topic, Mr. Somers. Pardon me, but you seemed so ill at ease that I didn’t press further. But I come from in the Northeast, where families are hungry because of those trees. Maybe researchers who promote them should go hungry for a little while too?”
What an extraordinary thing to say! Dmitri was stunned. Such blinding directness, so taboo in this country.
“Thank you for attending,” he mumbled.
“Yes, an important topic,” she said. “And you’re right, one needs to choose wisely.” She handed him her business card. It had a sweeping blue logo of a kingfisher bird in the upper left. Below her name, Nunti, it said, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, SHIVA ALTERNATIVES. He smiled and pocketed it as she walked away.
Why the sari? he wondered. It was an unusual choice for a Thai woman, neither a traditional wrap nor a modern-style outfit. In his head he heard a punch line: And the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’ Dmitri told himself: Careful, you’re giddy. It’s easy to be smug and feel misunderstood, he thought, working with Thai researchers who themselves saw the lives people led in the countryside, the chip-dry fields of the Northeast. There were Thais on both sides of the issue of introducing new tree species and their damage and promise. He didn’t take such questions personally. They were legitimate. But this professor’s provocative tone got under his skin.
When he and Jan had moved to Thailand the year before, he felt their life was charmed. They were newly married, he had meaningful work in farming research supporting a cause of equity and sustainability. It was an exciting time to be in Asia. When disappointments surfaced, he found himself unsettled, feeling once again insufficient. Really, that day’s assignment of speaking at a technical conference when he was no technician, was the least of his troubles. At the top of that list was the crisis with Jan.
The conference organizer said that Dr. Nunti was a bit eccentric but had a remarkable story. “She grew up in a poor family in Isaan,” he said. “She got a scholarship to Oxford. And then she came back. And then her troubles began.” He went on: her son had become a student organizer and he had been lost in the recent protests. (Nobody knew much about the boy’s father.)
As the coffee break ended, Dmitri stayed long enough to signal he wasn’t some aloof expat who breezes in, yaks about his work, then leaves. But the fact was, the next session about legumes was out of his area. So when the lobby emptied, he made for the door.
He was on his own—this late in the afternoon there was no point returning to the office, with rush hour mounting every minute he stood at the university gate. There was no reason to surf the traffic tide to their empty flat. Jan and her sister were cavorting in the rice fields and craft shops of Ubud, having skedaddled as soon as the Bangkok protests had grown likely. Honestly, Dmitri took comfort that she was away. The Red Shirts occupied the shopping district. One night on the phone, he asked when she was coming back and she couldn’t say. She was confused by the news about the danger, and she knew Dmitri tended to underestimate problems. It irritated him when she said that, but he missed seeing her lips as she said it.
He hailed a cab, undecided where to go. As he sat in the passenger seat, he uttered the name of the lane in the old downtown where the Thai-German Cultural Center was located. Why had he said that? The cabby, a young man, looked impassively ahead.
After an hour the driver let him out, and drove off in a skein of rain pooled by the curb. The sky looked angry enough to dump another cloudburst and cause another nasty snarl. But the lane was quiet, as he remembered. Dmitri and Jan had come here in their first days in Bangkok. The garden and the manor-style architecture were the sanctuary he recalled. He realized it was a Wednesday, the day they showed movies at every Goethe cultural center around the world. He would get dinner in the compound’s Teutonic Ratsstübe and then climb the steps to the auditorium, and sit in darkness and forget his loneliness. As a foreigner, he was used to being an outlier; he wore it like one of the office shirts in his closet. But this evening he just wanted to escape the awkwardness.
The movie was a Werner Herzog film, a “visionary” documentary about nomads in the Sahara, the poster said. Dmitri liked Herzog, his imagery was vivid and weird. Things were looking up.
He took a seat in the café, and his thoughts turned to the woman at the conference. She was indignant, as if Dmitri were forcing farmers to grow the only tree with a market demand, instead of seeing him as part of an effort to broaden farmers’ options. Some of these nonprofit groups had such narrow agendas! Weren’t they all on the same side?
For the thousandth time he reflected that nobody ever conveyed their perspective clearly. We never really listen, we just listen for our own beliefs. He should have laughed and said, “Well, professor, you know Osmo Wiio’s first law: Communication usually fails; it succeeds only by chance.”
He waved to catch the waiter’s eye but the man skillfully avoided him and slipped away. Dmitri’s gut tensed – less than thirty minutes remained before the movie started.
Until an hour ago he hadn’t planned to see any film, but suddenly it was vital that he get himself to the auditorium in time for the opening credits of this film. All he wanted was to fend off a foreboding he had, that this lonely stretch would last much longer than expected.
Was it only a month ago he was eating noodles with Jan as they sat together on a bench in Lumpini Park? She had shared her complaints about life in Bangkok: the throttling traffic, the constant feeling of disorientation, the smog, the tropical heat and constant sweating, the stultifying social life. She had been trying hard to look past all those things, she said, to make it an adventure.
The morning of the coup had been like any other. There was a radio announcement after ten in the morning. Dmitri would have missed it but for the local staff’s murmuring. Frankly, in the chaos of jockeying between the prime minister and parliament, the news struck many as a relief. Initially. But the days that followed weighed on everyone. Dmitri and Jan had talked quietly over dinner – how long would it be before elections were called?Had the prime minister really been on that flight out? The traffic and smog were building again. Jan started missing a day or two of work to migraines. Dmitri would come home and find her in the room upstairs, on her back in bed. She rose a bit slower than usual. He saw it was getting to be too much.
“I might need a couple of weeks to figure things out,” she said, head resting on her laced hands. That was before the riot. He had sat there on the park bench, as he sat now in the Ratsstübe, without any words in his head. Was this the start of their first hard rough patch? Why did he feel so numb?
Finally Dmitri caught the bartender’s eye, who alerted the waiter, who nodded across the room to Dmitri.
As it turned out, he made the film in plenty of time. In front of the theatre, two women sat at a table with a sign-up sheet. Their handbill was printed in Thai. He could make out that it was an announcement of a concert, or a petition. Once in his seat, he stared at it and saw halfway down, sandwiched in the middle, the English phrase ‘Empower the people.’ Those words apparently had a valence that rendered them untranslatable (otherwise why leave them in English?). He wondered at how those words must look in all their foreignness, like in vitro and ex situ in scientific papers.
At the bottom, also in English, were the words “Shiva Alternatives.” The page dimmed and the film began and someone behind him coughed in the darkness. Then the screen filled with a blinding shaft of Saharan sun and waves of heat rising from the earth.
The next morning Dmitri opened the newspaper to more images of Red Shirt protestors who had camped out at the Siam Square mall. Riot police had dispersed them, and violence erupted again. He called Jan that evening to check in and reassure her. “Tinya asks if you’ve gotten sick from the food,” he said. “She says Bangkok food is the best.”
“Of course,” she deadpanned. “Everything okay at work?”
“Same old,” he said. “You?”
“Ha. Sharon has fallen in love with the concierge. She likes men in sarongs, apparently.”
Their tone stayed light. But when they were about to wrap up, she said she wasn’t sure it was safe for her to come back. He replied that the disturbance was miles away from their daily lives. “But I completely get your concern,” he added. “Things look scary, especially from far away.”
Silence on the other end of the line.
The next day was Monday, and Dmitri was back in the weeds of editing research papers, summarizing items for the newsletter, visiting a print shop for publishing a monograph. On the drive downtown Daeng seemed distracted. Dmitri asked about his friend.
“Not well,” Daeng said. “That day he got hurt, I went to find him. I got on a bus to Siam Square, but it stopped. There was smoke. The police ordered everyone off the bus.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence. Dmitri could think of nothing to say. The only words that came to him sounded cheap.
They made a series of tight turns onto narrower lanes in the old neighborhood beside the river. This was Dmitri’s first time using this particular print shop which offered a discount. His office had shifted to mostly online publications but they did need to print a small run for officials and others.
Dmitri walked through the facility with the manager, nodded at the presses used for different-sized runs. It was like touring a history of publishing. Every few steps they passed another generation of blackened, steel printing technology, all jammed together. The city’s few remaining print shops were cramped, factory spaces, wedged into these alleys by the river. They thundered with the clatter of metal smacking together like blocks in a typesetter’s tray. Dmitri liked the pungent smell of ink and the sound of paper hurtling out of the press.
He came out onto the street with an agreement for the print job, and realized that he was only a short walk from the thicket of lanes that housed the address on Dr. Nunti’s card. Daeng called to say he was delayed in traffic, so Dmitri suggested they meet in an hour at the entrance to that lane instead.
He made his way to the address, past buildings crushed against each other. He scanned the street numbers, which skittered up and down with no clear sequence. He had allowed time to get lost, he expected to get lost. He succeeded, overshooting the smaller lane—an alley, actually—that snuck off in a dogleg. Doubling back, he found the sign that said, along with many Thai characters, St. Louis Court.
He choked out a hiccup of laughter. The notion of a posh Western name in Roman lettering at that spot struck him as richly absurd. St. Louis Court! He ventured down the alley to what looked like a mechanic’s shop. Then he saw the street number above a blue door.
Nothing said Shiva Alternatives. Still, he was at the number on the card, so he rang the doorbell. He looked across at a small shop with a metal accordion gate that was firmly shuttered. The shop’s sign, as Dmitri pieced out the Thai lettering, said something ‘press’ but also contained the word ‘gun,’ transliterated from English. Curious.
The blue door opened and a young man in a white shirt and pressed slacks let him in. He guided Dmitri to a chair in the narrow hall, then retreated to the back and returned bearing a cup of instant coffee. After two minutes Dr. Nunti appeared. This time, she was wearing jeans and a dark top, and her hair was pulled back. She looked at ease, if a little mystified by the unexpected visitor. She cleared off a desk in the front room and gestured for him to sit opposite her. “What can I do for you?”
At that moment Dmitri couldn’t imagine why he decided to visit this person who had oozed disdain at the conference. He had just a gnawing curiosity, as if to uncover some hypocrisy or contradiction. He didn’t know. But the handbill he picked up at the movie screening pushed a question to his mind.
“What does your organization do?” he said.
“What do we do? Did you hear my presentation at the symposium?”
“I did,” he lied, “but I wondered if there was more to it.” He recalled with embarrassment leaving the conference for the Ratsstübe.
“Well, here’s a brochure,” she said, handing him a photocopied page. “I presume your interest is in our community agriculture and forestry work?”
He nodded equivocally, as if to say Sure but honestly, I was hoping for more.
“This will give you an overview. If you have questions, please let me know.” She stood and walked back to the staircase.
He read the brochure, feeling the assistant’s eyes on him. Dmitri glazed over quickly at the call for action in wording identical to many other groups. What was he looking for here? Equity, justice.
Yet the brochure presented the problem of rural poverty and exploitation from a different angle than most of the papers that he read. It showed a clear moral framework, with good and bad actors clearly etched. He felt a pang reading “the unwitting accomplices in oppression who try to impose unworkable solutions through the acronyms of international agencies.” A paragraph near the end carried a familiar administrative obliqueness:
Unrestricted by the sectoral blinders of government and international agencies, Shiva Alternatives faces rural problems in a holistic manner. Disease, declining farm yields, and poverty are symptoms whose common source is the system. Shiva addresses this system at all levels, from local empowerment to policy work, including public debate and retribution.
Some editor had messed up. The last word should obviously be “redistribution,” with “of wealth” or “of resources” to be added. Dmitri frowned. This kind of error made him crazy—it undermined all the authority of the text. Maybe Doctor Nunti wasn’t committed to communicating after all. He approached the assistant, absorbed in his task.
“Could I have one more word with her?” he asked in Thai. The young man nodded just perceptibly toward the back staircase.
The second-floor office was small. Light squeezed in through a window and onto Dr. Nunti’s desk. She swiveled her chair toward him.
“Excuse me?” she said crisply. Even in a frown of irritation, her face looked intelligent, her gaze intense.
“Sorry, I wanted to thank you,” he said. “This gives me a much better idea of your work.”
She nodded.
“Also, sorry—but I noticed a tiny error. It’s small but, of course, I’m an editor,” he said with a silly shrug. He held out the brochure and pointed to the sentence.
She read it and returned his smile. “Yes, that’s correct.”
“It should say redistribution, yes?”
Her smile tightened. He waited for her to elaborate, still holding the brochure out. Nothing.
“What,” said Dmitri, “does retribution mean here?” He heard his voice wheedle higher than he intended.
“Something we should not hesitate to dole out when oppressors persist in being obtuse,” she said. “To be honest, you seemed more astute than this, Mr. Somers, if I may say.” Now it was her turn for eyebrow raising. “That was my sense at the conference when you tried to put a sympathetic face on wrong-headed research.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a reason you’re spared.”
“Spared?”
“So that you might report on what you witness. Without blinkers.”
Dmitri felt light-headed.
“You read the brochure,” she continued. “You know the blinders education forced on past generations, how it inured them to change despite their good intentions. You know the influence that international agencies have on forest departments–the suppression of local, better adapted efforts. What is it that you don’t understand?”
She stood, arms folded, a western posture. It was confusing to encounter a Thai person so willing to be confrontational. He bristled, yet was also fascinated.
“About me being spared?” he said.
“You’ll understand when it suits you.” With a brief nod, she signaled they were done.
When he pulled the door shut behind him, his hand rested on the doorknob. Across the alley, Gun-something printers was now open. His exchange with Dr. Nunti struck him as even more bizarre now that he was out in daylight, standing across from an everyday shop with a cement floor and old calendars on the wall. He walked back past the street sign announcing, ‘St. Louis Court.’
He thought again of what he should have said. “Well, you know Osmo Wiio’s first law: Communication usually fails; it succeeds only by chance.” Someday he would use that.
As he reached the mechanic’s garage, his phone rang. Daeng’s number came up on the screen with electric urgency, and Dmitri had a feeling of dread. In the distance he heard sirens.
2.
Dmitri was rattled as he watched the streets spin past the taxi’s window. What bothered him wasn’t Daeng getting tied up in traffic. It was that the exchange with Dr. Nunti had left him feeling on edge, and a nerve pain behind his right ear. She had basically said he was on the wrong side, again. Part of him dismissed that but some part of him nodded.
Every day more people were streaming downtown to the protests. The front page of the Bangkok Post that day had shown a sea of faces filling the Royal Green. TV clips panned across swaths of university students, street vendors, labor organizers, many donning bright green shirts. The next morning on the way to the office, Dmitri asked Daeng about his friend in the hospital.
“Not good,” the driver said flatly. He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything more. Daeng occupied the driver’s seat directly, like a pilot in the cockpit. They continued on. Cramped in the passenger seat, Dmitri turned his knees toward the window. The seatbelt’s sleek band slid against his clavicle. He considered the hospital. An image of Jan came to his mind, walking into a room where he was lying in a bed with metal side rails.
“How is his family?” he said.
Daeng’s eyes darted to meet his in the rearview mirror, then looked away. “Okay,” he said. “Worried.”
His extended arms swung the steering wheel slowly for a left turn. On a public university campus, people rarely talked openly about politics. International offices like theirs pretended they were above local politics, with chatter mainly about Asian issues. Even the local staff mentioned the protests only tangentially–comments about traffic detours and blockages, that kind of thing. He felt tempted to probe Tinya about the strange absence.
The issue finally came up in his Thai language lesson that afternoon. His tutor came to the apartment once a week, and politics was often a topic for conversation practice. She asked him to call her Kru, like at the school where she taught. Sometimes she came straight from classes, dressed in muted professional colors. Once she came directly from the hair salon, laughing and apologizing for the hair net—the stylist had run late. This time, she came from school, took her usual seat at the dining room table, and touched her glass of water repeatedly, a nervous tic.
Dmitri pushed himself into the Thai tonal ups and downs, and the long Pali-Sanskrit words for abstract concepts like “judge” and “democracy.” It was like the Latin creeping into Old English. The tutor touched her glass again, and gave a short laugh. “These words are tricky! My boss says the protestors at Royal Green got what they deserved.” She lifted her chin, a bit of bravado. She added that she herself agreed with the protests.
He struggled to stay in character as a language student. “What will happen with the protestors?” he asked carefully in Thai. “What will happen with democracy?”
The tutor giggled. “We do not know.”
Dmitri considered that. “I am thinking of going to Royal Green,” he said in the cadence of a textbook dialogue. “To see the protests.”
Kru made a face like she’d bitten something sour. “That is not good,” she said. “Foreigners should not intrude.” She added, “How will you know what to do?”
He practiced several forms of future tense. “I will observe,” he said.
“That is a bad idea,” she said, still with a sour face. “You are not a reporter.”
“Why?” he said. “What will happen?”
She shook her head. “Foreigners should not intrude in democracy.” Then she laughed.
The conversation kept gnawing at him. At the office he asked Tinya to lunch at the university cafeteria, hoping for some insight. But instead, over stir-fried rice, they traded complaints about the director and his misuse of the budget, and squandered credibility in the research community. The talk strayed to other countries. Tinya praised Chinese industriousness and endurance, and the broad education she’s gained from working with a range of people. She only recently learned the meaning of the Hindu Mel Pula holiday: Krishna’s killing of a bad ruler, celebrated with lighted candles. She encouraged her kids to go to Muslim families’ homes on Muslim holidays despite the bias that kept her from doing that as a kid. It was an unusually personal conversation. Yet Dmitri came away feeling he’d missed an opportunity.
He found himself craving the comfort of fast food. This was a source of shame; he considered himself a citizen of the world and hungry for other cuisines generally. But feeling ungrounded, he was soon in the mall near Democracy monument, queued up in McDonald’s. He took his fish sandwich and sat, hunched in a plastic seat, feeding the hot potato bits into his mouth. He felt vulnerable in the fluorescent light. In such settings he had spent many moments of his childhood. The bright plastic seats of home. He pictured Jan across from him, pointing a pencil-thin french fry at him, smiling. Her look is so playful, like he remembered from their years in St. Louis. He hasn’t seen that mischievous, lopsided smile in a while. And where was his?
What would she make of that? “Your subconscious is telling you something.” He didn’t see how she came to that conclusion (in his head). But maybe her fast-food avatar had a point?
That night after dinner, Jan called. “We should get you back here,” she said. “My morning walk today? I passed the place we stayed last year.” Then a pause. She asked how Bangkok was feeling. Was it safe for her to return?
He couldn’t read her intent through the receiver. Did she want to come back? “It feels safe to me, getting chauffeured around,” he said, “I mean I’m a farang, right? I have an international visa, we’re not harassed. We’re not the targets.”
“Right, but still,” she said. “Things happen.”
He sighed. “Right. But you hear what I’m saying? There’s the bad stuff you see in the news and there’s our life far away from the Royal Green.”
“Not that far. Maybe six miles, not a long ride. And my parents see the stuff on the Green, they stress, and then I hear about it.” After a pause, she said, “What do you want, Dee?”
Dmitri put his left hand on the counter and splayed his fingers on the cool stone. “I want you to feel safe.” He added, “I want you to come back.”
To learn more about the university’s role in the arrests, he began listening carefully to exchanges on campus, in the hallway on the way to the office, in the cafeteria where he got lunch. He heard rumors of camouflage-painted trucks in convoys headed for the western border, carrying bodies.
Then came the day the following week that Dmitri stepped outside for his ride to the office, and the office car pulled up, and he was met by a different driver. He asked where Daeng was, and the young man didn’t know. When they reached the office, Tinya was pacing outside the entrance. Dmitri approached and saw her face was drawn taut.
“Daeng is in the hospital,” she told him. “He was in a place he shouldn’t have been.” She blinked back tears while Dmitri stood, dumbstruck. He asked which hospital, and if he could get a driver to take him. Tinya nodded.
When they got there, it was a building that Dmitri would not have taken for a hospital if he rode past it, stuck between two rows of stores on an industrial artery. It was faceless and rather dingy, like a public factory. He walked in, looking for an information desk but found no central hub. He wandered deeper into the building until he pushed through a door and faced a hall where soldiers in camo uniforms stood at the doorways of every other patient room. There several people were moaning, or crying. One voice (male? female?) was keening in pain. He felt the chaos. As the soldiers turned to him, Dmitri turned and retraced his steps.
That’s when he nearly ran right into Dr. Nunti. He pushed a swinging door, rushing to leave the ward, and she was approaching from the other side. This time she was in a dark uniform. She regarded him with a startled frown.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. Dmitri apologized and explained he was trying to find the patient information desk. She pointed over her shoulder. “That way.”
He had begun walking in that direction when, behind him, Nunti said, “But there are no farang patients here.”
He turned, nodding in profile to show that he understood. “It’s a friend,” he said.
“Seems unlikely,” she said, not looking up from what appeared to be a clipboard. He felt dismissed, like when he had visited her office.
“He was at the protests,” Dmitri said, his voice rising in exasperation. He stopped himself from adding, “for chewing gum.”
Then she looked up. She walked briskly back toward him. “Listen,” said in a lower voice. She approached as if she knew him. “Don’t say that when you ask about him. Just give his name. Say you don’t know what’s wrong with him. They’ll have to check all the intakes then. Who knows where they put him.”
She turned and disappeared through the swinging door.
He found Daeng in the cardiac ward. Dmitri couldn’t get a grasp on why, but the room number the nurse gave him was correct: a shared room with a wide window and four starched hospital beds. In one of them was the rigid face of his driver. Daeng was lying on an incline, his neck in a brace, his eyes and forehead smeared in purples and blues.
As Dmitri approached, Daeng’s eyes lifted and a woman in the chair beside the bed, Dmitri guessed his wife, turned to wai the foreign visitor. “Mr. Meetri,” said Daeng in a low voice. “You have come.” Something about his expression signaled embarrassment.
Dmitri shook his head and smiled to lighten the mood. His tendency to skewer seriousness with a joke felt overwhelming, but not appropriate. “My friend,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
Daeng smiled in the Thai manner of using light laughter to signal discomfort. The woman maintained her pose, palms together, deep bow. When she sat up, she too was smiling.
“You look a little rough,” Dmitri continued. “I’d hate to see the other guy.”
“He looks worse,” the driver said. Dmitri eyed him closely. What deep cover this guy gave to his ember of humor, Dmitri thought.
“I guess they ran out of beds, putting you in the heart ward. Have they told you when you’ll get out?” Dmitri blinked as if scrolling past all the questions he wanted to ask. Who did this to you? What happened?
Daeng didn’t reply. “We made ourselves known,” he said. His wife stared at him, it was impossible to say whether from fear or love.
Dmitri gave a slight nod. The room felt too open for this conversation, even a light-hearted version— there were three other patients in various states of consciousness. Yet standing there, looking down at his coworker in the hospital bed, sallow in a blue-patterned hospital gown, Dmitri felt suddenly close to the man and his wife. “How is your heart?” he said.
Daeng nodded curtly, his lips pressed flat.
“Let me know how I can help,” Dmitri said.
A small smile of acknowledgement creased Daeng’s face, as if it were painful and caused a twinge.
“And your friend?” Dmitri asked.
Daeng, straight-faced, simply stared ahead and blinked. Their conversation was ending. “And Madam Meetri?” he said, his brow knitted.
“She’s fine, thank you,” Dmitri said. He pictured Jan at a batik studio in Bali. Daeng looked expectant, as if waiting for Dmitri to share more, about why she had stayed away so long. As if probing Dmitri’s fears. “Any message for Tinya and the others?”
“Please apologize for my absence. I will be in soon.” A sheepish smile. “Then Supro can take a break.”
Daeng’s wife said something in Thai that Dmitri didn’t catch. Daeng added, “My wife thanks you for coming.” She smiled and nodded at Dmitri, a gesture across the language chasm. Dmitri wai-ed, turning from her to Daeng, then glanced around the room and turned to go.
He couldn’t explain why the brief visit seemed significant. They had exchanged no real information. Had the driver understood about his and Jan’s crumbling relationship all along? Seeing Daeng in the hospital bed, Dmitri felt a kind of acknowledgment. After so many meaningless non-conversations to and from campus, they had seen each other here. Maybe this was the coda to Wiio’s law? “…succeeds only by chance.” Maybe this was that chance.
Dmitri was nearly at the hospital entrance when he heard his name. He turned and saw Dr. Nunti. “Did you find your friend?” she said.
“Yes, thank you for that advice.”
“Not at all,” she said. There was an awkward moment. He noticed her eyes were moist.
“Are you visiting someone here too?” Dmitri asked.
She bit her lip, regained composure. “They’re not anymore.”
He started to apologize. She shook her head emphatically. “You know what you need to do?”
Dmitri saw her professional hauteur fall away, her gaze now was raw. “What do you mean?” he said.
“You have a role, remember,” she said.
He winced, recalling her first declaration of that. Weren’t they past that? “I might do better with a press badge. They say it’s a bad idea for farang to butt into Thai affairs.”
Her eyes narrowed. “But you’re already here.”
He was backpedaling. It felt validating, what she was saying. “Well, even that could change,” he said. Under his breath he added, “Though I suppose you have a point.” He recalled Daeng and his wife, heads bowed. But Nunti was gone.
The news broadcast conflicting reports of casualties. Some outlets said that hundreds were dead or missing, the main newspapers reported only a few dozen. Even getting updates from the hospital staff proved impossible. Then a few days later, Tinya appeared in Dmitri’s office doorway, her hands templed in a distracted pose.
“Do you have a moment?” she said. She paused. “Something has come up.” Dmitri motioned for her to come in, but she lingered in the doorframe.
“I’m so sorry Daeng won’t be able to drive you,” she said in a hesitant monotone. “It’s his funeral ceremony.”
Daeng’s funeral? Dmitri felt light-headed. He had no hint that the man was close to dying. Tinya went on explaining in the same even tone where the event would be, how and when Dmitri should plan to attend. Was she dissociating? Dmitri wondered as she spoke. Was this conversation at all normal? He felt his neck stiffen at the notion of a formal Thai funeral—he’d never been to one—but he focused on her explanation. And he saw at the edge of her eye a wet glimmer.
The next day, wearing the prescribed long-sleeve white shirt, Dmitri road in the car with the other driver, Supro, to the temple. Supro said nothing during the entire drive.
They reached a quiet neighborhood and the temple Wat Phra Mongkut at dusk. The place felt like a small town with children playing in the road. Walking into the temple compound, Dmitri saw Daeng’s wife and felt a strange dual role of manager and personal connection to this couple with whom he’d exchanged only a few dozen words. He saw the three younger people sitting with her, they must be the children. There were folding chairs set up in several rows, and in the small sanctuary flower arrangements hung from the ceiling around the edge of the room, up to the white casket in front. To the left of the casket, a framed photo of Daeng, looking stiffly directly into the camera, stood on an easel.
Was the older girl beside Daeng’s widow their daughter? She held her mother’s hand tenderly. From her outfit and haircut, bangs wedged on an angle like the students on campus, she appeared to be an undergraduate. It shifted his picture of Daeng and his wife, of their hopes for their children. Seeing the two together made his stomach twist with sadness.
Dmitri was headed for one of the folding chairs but Supro motioned toward a small air-conditioned room off to the side, with several large wooden chairs. This was some kind of VIP green room, and struck Dmitri as a typical postcolonial trope: the white guy getting special treatment. But it may have also been due to the perception that Dmitri was Daeng’s boss. It stirred feelings of being an imposter; Dmitri sat erect in the wooden chair. A local in his forties sat beside him and introduced himself as Daeng’s brother-in-law. He spoke English well, and explained patiently some things Dmitri needed to know about paying respects. Dmitri did as he was told: kneeled before the casket, bowing just once. After Dmitri returned to his seat, the brother-in-law told him about Daeng’s mother, who raised eight children on her own, selling fried snacks and ice cream in order to feed the kids.
Four young, head-shaven monks filed into the room through the glass doors, a line of golden-clad figures, followed by a youth who began chanting a drone that mingled with theirs. Each monk held a large blue fan before his face. The chanting lasted ten minutes, with all attendees bowing deeply with hands steepled together. This scene felt like an incantation, a comforting echo of the church liturgy of his childhood but more salving. Part of that, no doubt, was the fact he understood none of what was being said.
Tinya had come and sat in the chair on the other side of Dmitri, and took up the role of explaining customs. As the ceremony was winding down, she said, “It is time to give the monks their offering.”
The ceremonial white guy role again. Dmitri was guided to stand before the row of monks, kneel and wai the monk before him, bow and present a basket of food. Dmitri felt like a total fraud trapped in a kabuki role, kneeling and bending forward. Also, it felt strangely meaningful.
Afterward, Dmitri bowed to Daeng’s wife and then followed Supro out into the night toward the car as it started to rain. He wished he knew more phrases in Thai that he could have said in consolation. Even in English, he had almost none. My deepest condolences. May his memory be a blessing. Tinya appeared at his elbow and asked for a ride. “It’s on the way,” she said. She conferred with Supro in Thai, and rode in the front seat. At one point on the highway, she turned to speak to Dmitri in the backseat. In a dreamy, almost nostalgic voice she said, “I remember during the war, all the trucks would come on the highway from the airport with the bodies.”
Before he could react, she went on: “They were dripping, they had them on ice. The melting ice and the blood dripping from the trucks onto the pavement.” Still dreamy sounding, her voice rising at the absurdity and horror. Trucks zoomed past them in the night, the shadows that brought the memory back.
Back at home, Dmitri wondered how Daeng had gotten himself to the Royal Green that day of the protest. Had he taken a river taxi downstream and docked, then walked the last bit through the narrow old-town alleys? Surely he didn’t drive. Would he have stood on a bus like any other pedestrian, waiting for his stop? Did he walk from the bus stop, looking to meet up with someone at the Green? Dmitri followed him in his head, searching for signs of how Daeng approached the unknowable future.What did he expect to find? What did he hope to accomplish?
Maybe the brother-in-law would have told him some of these things if Dmitri had asked. Maybe his friend at Shiva Alternatives had a brochure that would shed some light. Maybe none of those things mattered. When he imagined sharing these questions with Jan, he heard her sigh, as she did at news from the protests.
Unable to sleep, Dmitri went to a small filing cabinet in their bedroom and pulled out a folder. He took it to the dining room table and laid out its contents: a generic will template, filled out; a page with key information on account numbers and health policies; and a clipping – a headline from the date of the coup six months before, when the junta seized power. Dmitri wasn’t sure why the clipping was in with the formalities of their expat life, but looking at it now, it seemed a vital piece of information.
The cone of light from a floor lamp included the clipping and the photocopy of his passport page. Six months now. He looked back; it was five months ago when he and Jan began having small squabbles about stupid things. He was used to ascribing these to the stress of expat life. The first he noticed it might be more was just before her sister came, a couple of months ago. He thought about Daeng, and tried to recall any changes with him in the weeks leading up to the demonstrations, any words exchanged, observations about politics, the weather, the sunlight.
He packed up the folder again, stuffed it back in the file cabinet. He played some John Prine, then went to bed. Again came the dream-like imagery from the McDonald’s episode, a video game character pounding down the track, racing, and mirror images on either side. Was Dmitri shifting from the central figure to a side character? Was he becoming? Where were they going? God, he was delirious. But he had already made, he felt, a kind of promise.
3.
The next morning, instead of going to the office, he asked Supro to drop him at Lumpini Park. He decided he would walk to the Royal Green from there.
Lumpini was one of the few Buddhist names Dmitri knew, the birthplace of Siddhartha. The name held a kind of mythic power in the grimy center of the concrete metropolis. He heard it in the way that Bangkok residents savored the word, a kind of comfort food.
He had heard it in Supro’s voice as the driver banked off the highway and rolled from the exit ramp into stalled traffic, saying, “I’ll stop at Lumpini corner.” The intersection off the ramp was snarled near a schoolyard where parents were dropping off uniformed children. Dmitri and the driver barely exchanged another word before Dmitri launched from the passenger seat and skipped to the curb. The morning was gray around the edges but deep blue straight overhead.
He walked through the green park conscious of his breathing: a slow intake, the hold, and the whoosh of exhaling. He felt composed and his body felt good.
The Royal Green was an hour’s walk west of the park. Rama IV Road at that hour was choked with yellow-and-green taxis, hulking white commercial trucks, and shiny dark sedans of people who lived in the highrises out Sukhumvit Road.
To choke off protestors’ downtown access, the mayor had closed the monorail stations, and brown-uniformed police blocked the entrances. On foot, Dmitri passed department stores, cafes, electronics outlets and steakhouses along the way, and beggars who staked out the overpasses, as real-estate conscious as any retailer.
From the park’s edge, he soaked in the lawn and trees, the lake with paddle boats tied together at the shore, bobbing patiently for weekenders who would never come. Dmitri could stay here and have the park to himself for the day. Soak up the vibe, then hail a cab back home.
That day when he was with Jan in the park and they were eating noodles on the bench and she was telling him her frustrations while he stared dumbly at those tethered boats, he had imagined the two of them pedaling one out into the center of the lake. In his mind, they were laughing at their ridiculous bicycle motions over water, dumping the weight of their worries into the lake. He saw themselves actually miming the opening of a heavy sack and turning it upside down, shaking it out on the ripples stirred in the light breeze.
Now even the memory of that daydream felt somehow obscenely escapist or colonial or something.
Coming to join the protestors was more serious than being a witness. His presence was a political act. His job required political neutrality and this was not. He couldn’t discuss this with his boss, of course, but the afternoon before Daeng’s funeral, Dmitri had broached the subject with Tinya. Dmitri had harrumphed that he didn’t understand how there wasn’t wider protest against the junta, and said, “For Daeng I should do more than just show up at his funeral.” Tinya shot him a look of fear. “He did more than he should have,” she said. “He put us all in risk. You know the term loose cannon? They don’t know the damage they do, rolling around and exploding.”
A low roar now came from the direction of the Royal Green. It seemed to rise from the treetops before him, but the source must have been further away. Dmitri wasn’t sure if the noise came from the unamplified crowd or if it had the electric crackle of a speaker and a P.A. system. Walking through this refuge in the middle of the city, the low rumble felt ominous. He became a bit terrified.
In his pocket he clutched a dark blue bandanna, flimsy protection against teargas and batons. He wondered if this path he was taking toward the Green, the Rama IV road and side streets, would also be his escape route when things went tits up. On the sidewalk at an overpass he passed another child begging with her mother, and put a 20-baht note in her cup.
He passed on, and felt a sense of purpose carry him forward. He was part of something larger, even if it wasn’t really his fight. He wasn’t Thai, but thought if democracy in the U.S. were facing an existential threat, he would be out in the streets. But he was here, and had to admit his presence was optional.
He heard Jan’s voice, warm and reasonable, when he talked about going to bear witness: “Do they need you there? Does it really advance the cause to have a farang detained?” It made her feel physically sick to think of him in a jail like the immigration detention facility where she had done volunteer work, helping detainees get what they needed. “What good would it do?” she said.
Dmitri wasn’t sure.
She had booked her flight, finally, returning to the States with her sister. She had gone back and forth for weeks on the idea of returning to Bangkok. Her sister had prevailed. “Until the State Department revises its safety alert,” she had said. Jan sounded calm, the trip had given her distance and perspective. He could hear her concern in her voice.
He pulled out the dark blue bandanna from his pocket. The moment he tied it over his face, he knew, he would become a target for police attention. Was he a reckless person? What had Daeng done in his position?
Daeng thought, as he approached the Green: Am I a reckless person? I have family.
Dmitri couldn’t make out the words over the sound system. The sounds from blocks away were a muddy sludge. Walking in that direction, he didn’t feel reckless, he felt determined. He watched a flood of traffic come toward him, and saw at the edge of the road a young man in a wheelchair, rolling himself against the tide of headlights. Dmitri felt a pang of fear for the young man’s safety but as he got closer he could see the other had no such fear. He was pumping his arms furiously on the wheel rims, powering himself onward toward the Green, unfazed by cars passing within inches of his hand.
Dmitri greeted the young man in Thai, and received a nod in response. Dmitri asked if it would be more safe coming onto the sidewalk?
“Nowhere is safe!” the other muttered. Unspoken: Stupid farang. True enough.
“You are going to join the demonstration?” said Dmitri, carefully pronouncing the word from Pali-Sanskrit.
The man continued pumping, nodded. Raised an eyebrow. “You?”
Dmitri was abreast of him now, matching the wheelchair pace. “Yes. Going for a friend.”
The young man glanced in Dmitri’s direction without letting up his pumping. “Your friend doesn’t need you now,” he said.
“Look, friend,” Dmitri said, a little louder than he expected, “can you manage with this crowd? It could get dangerous.”
“Who’s your friend?” said the man, meeting his gaze.
Dmitri recognized something about his expression—the calm yet challenging directness so rare in this country. It was familiar and disconcerting. Nunti, it was her expression when he had pointed out the brochure mistake. Clear, dead-eyed, observant.
Suddenly Dmitri realized that he would see her this morning, most likely. She would be at the edge of the crowd, watching, scanning for her son among the speakers and activists. Or maybe she would be busy at a white tent emblazoned with the Red Cross, assisting wounded or tear-gassed people, providing first aid or handling intake information, wielding a clipboard and wearing a white coat.
Or perhaps the professor would be standing atop a makeshift barricade, feet planted to steady herself, waving the striped Thai flag aloft like Liberty in the Delacroix image of the French Revolution. She would make herself a bulwark. Sure, nonprofits like Shiva Alternatives charged the ramparts and demanded action in the name of the disenfranchised. For most, it was show. Dmitri felt an equally important role was played by system-type workers, plugging away at bland research that addressed the needs of those disenfranchised and the sidelined farmers of Asia. Dmitri had seen many of them in the three years he’d worked and traveled here: saronged men and women in the hills of Sri Lanka, survivors haunted by a brutal, decades-long civil war. In Indonesia, he walked with a knot of head-scarved Balinese women at the fringe of a field (a few miles from the rice-terrace beautified hotel where Jan and her sister were now staying, where he had stayed with her in happiness before), talking about planting a windbreak to shield their vegetables from the killing winds.
In his mind’s eye, these scenes churned against a background of forests and his powerpoint slides, strung together by wisps of tear gas. Those fields linked him and his trek trudging city pavement to the Green. Of course he would be there! His life had been pointing to this. Even Prof Nunti played a role in getting him here. They kept on to where Rama IV turned into Progress Road (Charoen Krung), approaching the palace.
He and the young man had almost reached the intersection when suddenly the crowd noise swelled to a dull roar. Dmitri saw a tide of thousands of human forms, with white police helmets bobbing like buoys above a current of black hair and varied headgear. As Dmitri’s eyes adjusted to the chaotic motion, he made out the hammering of batons and a clatter of hard clear shields. The sound sent a jolt to his system, his neck and shoulders.
He turned and saw people following behind them. They too appeared curious to see what the crowd was up to. One couple appeared younger, maybe late twenties. Dmitri observed he was the only farang in the wide scene. He was an idiot.
“Can you manage?” said the young man in the wheelchair. It took Dmitri a moment to realize he was talking to him. Before he could answer, a rock landed on the pavement at his feet.
As the young guy gave his rims another spin, a smoking cannister rolled into one of the wheels. Dmitri’s brain registered teargas as his eyes started to prickle. A swarm of bees were attacking his retinas. He thought of kicking it away, but saw that he might topple the wheeled man if he did, so he turned and ran, grabbing the bandanna from his pocket. The wheeled man careened one way, the centripetal force appeared to raise him up on one rim as he made a turn, and Dmitri ran at an angle as he sprinted the other. He was making for an open alley, one not clogged with vending carts and people. His feet found footing where none seemed to be. His body had kicked into gear, leaving his mind back in the plumes of smoke unfurling across the street.
But his mind back there soberly took in the advancing police with their plastic shields, truncheons raised high, then swinging down. The stakes. He became aware of a hiccupping, gasping sound pursuing him as he pounded forward. It was coming from him, he realized, he was struggling for air. Another alley appeared and he raced through it.
Running, dodging, his mind fixed on those truncheons and Nunti’s voice, telling him he’d been spared. By whom? “Without blinkers,” she said. He looked around and saw so many others running too, fleeing. He slowed to a jog, took in a deeper breath. Was this really a step toward witnessing?
A map clicked into place in his head, with streets pointing back home that he did not have time to question. At the far end, there was the wide boulevard beside the canal, which he could follow to Democracy Monument. There he might find a taxi willing to move for an extra pink note.
Minutes later he was in one, watching the streets roll past, his hair pasted to his forehead, bandanna stuffed back into his jacket, soaked with sweat and smelling of teargas. His eyes were still stinging, blinking furiously. The driver eyed him in the rearview, his worried face examining Dmitri’s.
He would get out at the Buffalo bridge intersection and walk back to his apartment. Lay low for the rest of the weekend. He had to document what he’d seen. Maybe things had unfolded the way they were meant to. He wouldn’t tell Jan about the demonstration yet–it would just upset her. And for what purpose? When she returned from the trip with her sister, they would start things over. She’d cancel her ticket home.
But he would check his notes against every article he could find about the demonstration, listen to every podcast, and in the brutal crackdown that followed, he would scan reports for names of the missing. Would he recognize any? What happened to the young man in the wheelchair?
He was asking himself that a week later, while writing up a few pages about that day, which he decided he would send to the Bangkok Times, the English-language paper. He would send it anonymously, to avoid blowback for the office. But word needed to get out about what happened. He had it mostly written and was shutting down his computer for the evening when Tinya appeared in the doorway. “I wanted to ask,” she said, “if you might visit Daeng’s family this weekend.”
Dmitri looked at her and considered how she had asked. He saw that it was the right thing. So he filed an overtime request for Supro and on Saturday, the driver came and drove Dmitri to the riverside neighborhood. They arrived at Daeng’s family’s house amid a rat-a-tat of jackhammers. The city’s transformation didn’t stop for weekends. Dmitri asked the driver, as he turned off the engine, if he would come in and translate if needed. Supro nodded.
In the end, no translation was needed. Dmitri rang the doorbell, waited, and rang again. When nobody came, he looked around, unsure whether to leave a note. As they walked back to the car, Dmitri could see into the temple compound across the lane. There beneath a filigreed awning of the temple, a small group of people gathered. The temple’s facade was covered with pale plaster where bits of glass and candy-colored mirror fragments glittered. The dancing light had a shimmering effect like a mirage.
BIO
David Taylor’s fiction has appeared in Rio Grande Review, Washington City Paper, Gargoyle, Jabberwock, The MacGuffin, and anthologies, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His debut story collection, Success: Stories, received the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Fiction Prize. His nonfiction book Soul of a People (Wiley) about the WPA writers, provided the basis for a documentary feature of that title and for The People’s Recorder, nominated for 2025 Best Indie podcast. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University.
